Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Review
After being caught in the middle of yet another Space Pirate scuffle with the Galactic Federation, this time a mishap with a strange artefact sees Samus zapped away to the planet Viewros. There, she’s enlisted by the holographic ghosts of the Lamorn to help preserve and release their dead civilisation’s knowledge into the wider galaxy. To do this, you must reach and retrieve five teleporter keys from five different biomes and regions on this planet.
Stripped of her equipment, as is tradition, Samus is given the beginnings of a brand new set of gear, almost all with a slick new purple hue… because they’re pretty much all psychic. A gemstone is embedded in her helmet, so the scanning visor also allows for a variety of telekinetic manipulations, the beam cannon can now fire guided bolts, and there’s barely visible platforms and grapple points that you need the psychic view and psychic grapple to manipulate. The nomenclature is pretty ham-fisted, but it is an effective blend of the old and the new, successfully adding a new layer on top and around the core gameplay. It can be a little confounding at times, when confronted by a puzzle that leans on a less commonly used mechanic. I often forgot that I could turn a morph ball bomb into a grab-able psychic bomb to trigger raised nodes, for example.
You have that same blend of old and new, from a Metroid series perspective, for the controls and combat. The fundamentals are now those of a modern first person shooter, though you still lock on with the left trigger and automatically circle strafe around enemies. This means you can easily keep moving and evading incoming attacks thanks to this, and then move your actual target point on screen using the right stick or with motion controller after touch. Alternatively you can drop in and out of mouse mode when playing with detached Joy-Con 2 on Nintendo Switch 2, getting more of a PC FPS control scheme, which certainly has advantages for quick and precise aiming.
Personally, I kept things very vanilla, playing purely with controller, no motion controls, and then regularly re-aiming with a snap as needed. This generally worked very well for me, though it’s fair to say that it does struggle a bit when trying to target certain enemies in a crowd – some of the combat-heavy sections really throw a lot of enemies at you – and for targeting weak spots during the larger scale boss battles. Those moments aren’t common, and you can overcome them with a little patience, the game generally feeling quite forgiving in these most frantic and frenetic moments.
Through the opening biome of the adventure, the mixture of nature and sandstone-like ruins ably demonstrates the downfall of the Lamorn civilisation and how nature was corrupted around them. From here, things get far more heavy metal, from lighting powered factories to facilities deep in a volcano and beyond – are the Lamorn actually Bond villains?
They’re typical elemental archetypes, but I rather enjoyed how the Lamorn facilities and technology have more than a hint of H.R. Giger, Alien and Prometheus to their look and feel. It’s obviously not wholly original, but this biomechanical style absolutely works for me.
Instead of linking these regions together directly, they’re instead joined up by the barren desert of Sol Valley, a wide open expanse that you need Samus’ new Vi-O-La motorbike to cross in any sensible amount of time. It’s a pretty slick addition and it’s fun to zip up and over the sand dunes, crashing through green crystals and searching for the handful of secrets and points of interest between locations.
You can be attacked during these moments by a few different types of fast-moving enemy, and thankfully things are kept quite light, thanks to a locking homing disc attack… or you can generally just avoid them. The only issue is that there’s not that much to do here. There’s a handful of Breath of the Wild-like puzzle temples to seek out, and green crystals that you need to power up your Power Beam, but it’s largely just connective tissue between the regions.
And you will be going back and forth plenty. Backtracking and exploring newly accessible parts of the world is a key part of the Metroidvania formula, and in some ways Metroid Prime 4 does this very well, and in others it makes it a bit of a chore. Actually getting back to previous locations isn’t fast travel fast, but thanks to the bike, it’s also not actually all that time consuming. It does still feel like dead time, but the actual time you spend trekking back and forth isn’t too bad when you feel focused on an objective.
The real problem with this, though, is the game simply doesn’t leave you alone to soak in the atmosphere and figure things out for yourself. Early on in the adventure you meet Specialist Miles MacKenzie, who fights alongside you for a brief period, before setting up a camp for himself and any other Federation Troopers that you find along the way, putting together a rag-tag team of survivors. They’re a contrasting group of characters, but MacKenzie stands out for his… quirky dialogue, when compared to the more by-the-book nature and tone of some other troopers (who I inevitably liked more).
I have mixed feelings about this and how it affects the storytelling alongside the stoically silent Samus. The vast majority of the game, is spent on your own with rare interjections over comms when exploring a region, but once you’ve completed an area, beaten a boss, found a new tech part, it feels like MacKenzie helicoptering in like an overbearing parent to make sure you don’t get lost. That’s even more annoying on the handful occasions where he’s actively misleading, “helpfully” suggesting I visit one locale or another only for me to hit a familiar dead end and double back again. If I’d done this on my own? Fine, but for it to be because the game effectively lied to me is annoying. I know this handholding is important for the game’s accessibility, but there really should be an option to turn this off.
For the overarching story, I really liked the drip feed of learning what happened to the Lamorn and how their civilisation died, picking up the journals and logs, and finding their psychic statues. The broad team of Federation Troopers did also grow on me for their key moments and narrative payoffs.
